


Happily Ever After

by thequidditchpitch_archivist



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, BDSM, Chan, Dark, Dom/sub, Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-12-17
Updated: 2005-12-17
Packaged: 2018-10-27 14:38:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,356
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10811022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thequidditchpitch_archivist/pseuds/thequidditchpitch_archivist
Summary: Voldemort has won and Tom returns for Minerva.





	Happily Ever After

**Author's Note:**

> Note from Annie, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [The Quidditch Pitch](http://fanlore.org/wiki/The_Quidditch_Pitch), which went offline in 2015 when the hosting expired, at a time I was not able to renew it. I contacted Open Doors, hoping to preserve the archive using an old backup, and began importing these works as an Open Doors-approved project in April 2017. Open Doors e-mailed all authors about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact us using the e-mail address on [The Quidditch Pitch collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/thequidditchpitch/profile).

  
Author's notes: Contains only references to het sex, noncon, chan (sort of), and consentual BDSM. This is primarily a horror piece, written for Pre_Raphaelite1's birthday. Thanks to Wildestranger for the beta!  


* * *

**Happily Ever After**

Minerva wakes up in a tangle, her limbs trapped, rendered immobile by the damp sheets that have twisted themselves around her naked body. It is too hot in the castle these days, the Scottish chill driven away by the noxious, humid heat of a reptile's preferred environment. Impossible to forget, even for a second, that Hogwarts and every secret within belongs to Him now.  
  
A bead of sweat rolls slowly down her spine and combined with the thought of Him, it brings on a shiver. She rises and opens the closet door to reach for her robe, but her closet isn't empty.  
  
A Muggle child's Halloween toy dangles before her eyes, the mockery of a witch bobbing up and down on its string, grinning vacantly and for a moment she wonders if she should envy the thing. She knows exactly how the cheap plastic figure feels, with its black and white striped skinny legs and shiny buckled shoes and pointed green skinned face smiling a horrible smile, although she does not know when it became her darkest terror. Wandless, she concentrates and says the spell. The toy does not change, yet she can still hear her own hoarse shriek of a laugh and she is able to put it back in the closet where it belongs. She will wear yesterday's robes, just as she had the day before.  
  
_Ridikkulus._  
  
She heads downstairs, where the ghosts twirl around and around, gone mad from sharing the plane of their essence with the dark mist that fills in the imprint of their personalities. Blood gone, wounds gone, faces gone, nothing left but eyeless grey shadows and instead of sating their nonexistent hunger with maggoty meat and vinegar wine they mock the kisses that turned the students into blank little dolls. They lucky ones were rotted away and the pretty ones were _gone_.   
  
(Because she hadn't seen Fenrir shove his filthy, rancid cock down the throat of one of them. She did not want to remember that it had been a Hufflepuff once and only eleven when it had been kissed.)  
  
They were gone, just gone and nothing worse.   
  
There is something she can feel, a dry static skin with the slightest tang of bile lying just outside of her brain. It's a cowardly thing, never seen except with the peripheral vision of her consciousness. It's his cornsilk touch on her mind and she would recognize it anywhere.  
  
My love, I've come a-courting.  
  
So dim to have been surprised in the beginning when he came back for her. She should have known that it did not matter that her body was no longer firm and supple, flesh rounded and her bloody, buggering innocence, for the sake of the nothing that was truly holy, was a whispering echo from a time very few alive could still remember.   
  
She had belonged to him back then, body and soul. Delighted when he marbled her pale skin. Come crawling to his hand on her knees across the cold stone of the dungeon floor upon his command and worshipped him for making her do so.   
  
She had paid one price when she drew a line, refused to recognize his dominion by blood; the pain had been hers by nature and right, but he made it become hurt, sore and twisted. Since then, no amount of self-flagellation had been enough to atone, and she would allow no other to touch her. She meditated upon her sins, seeking absolution with every kiss of her whip, his face sharp and clear in her mind's eye. Sometimes, she came and she knew she would never be free from the shame of it.  
  
It's about what is and what was and whatever shall be, nightmare world without end. Amen.  
  
"Naughty, naughty Minerva." Peeves has not changed. He is true North, the only thing immune in a castle where the walls are diseased. "My sweet, bonny McGonny-sickles!"  
  
"Are you going to tell me how?" she asks, too tired to try to trick him into revealing his secrets, if he even has any. "How is it that you are still the same?"  
  
A house-elf carries a blood-soaked goblin down a side hallway, both moaning piteously.  
  
"Detention!" Peeves cackles, ignoring her and harassing the house-elf instead.  
  
Her classroom is empty; the students are all gone. A very few of them might even still be alive somewhere. She sits alone in her office, the Deputy Headmistress' Office, every single day, in case one of them is looking for her. She waits patiently, ready to welcome the children back to the solace of the academic world, ready to provide comfort with the familiarity of its rituals and traditions.   
  
Not a student but a summons brings an end to waiting. The jeweled green tattoo on her breast writhes in two-dimensional seduction, an inverted breath against her skin. Like the Dark Mark, it calls her to Him. It cannot be ignored. Deftly, precisely, she skirts the very edges of a memory of being held down and inked, her brittle arm bones breaking as she struggled in the clumsy, sweaty grip of a boy she'd once taught how to transfigure a hedgehog into a pincushion. He had claimed he was under orders not to hex her, but the look in his eyes made her fear the intimacy of his touch so much more than his clumsy spellwork.   
  
She wishes she'd failed him. She should have failed all of the green ones.  
  
Anticipation has stirred the stagnating air, bringing every foul creature incubated within the walls out to watch her go to him. Things without discernable centres bow obsequiously as she passes. If it is an honor, it is not one she appreciates.  
  
The door to the Headmaster's office is open, expectant. She does not hesitate and does not react even when it closes violently behind her while she is climbing the stairs.  
  
He greets her warmly, Tom Riddle once more. He is all youthful beauty, smooth skin and sharp edges and bigdark eyes that promise sacred mystery and delight. He smiles and it is as though she is seventeen again and sitting by the lake, the first warmth of spring overlaying the winterlong chill.  
  
"Isn't it wonderful?" he says. "Minerva, I no longer need the fear. It is done. I have succeeded in everything!"  
  
Harry. Not Harry. NotHarryNotHarryNotHarryNotHarryNotHar–  
  
"You are still a horror," she answers, folding her arms in front of her, as though she is disciplining a beast child student. _Slytherin._ "Beauty is only skin deep."   
  
"Then you will not mind when I restore yours, my dear. Neither age nor death will touch me or mine." He stands, and she can see that the illusion is truly complete. He wears long black robes and an old Slytherin tie, the style from her schooldays, fabric she had kissed, that had been tied tightly around her wrists, her ankles…  
  
He follows her eyes and laughs freely from his throat. He still knows her.  
  
He is coming for her.  
  
"Everything will be beautiful again," he promises. "It is my world and I am going to – _we_ are going to – shape it as we see fit."  
  
"How can you say such things?" she asks, desperately looking from side to side for a way out of that room, a way out of her living hell, a way to suicide before he can touch her.   
  
"Because it is the truth. I've never lied to you, Minerva."  
  
"That's because you are the lie, Tom." Too late, she realizes her mistake. "Or whatever you're calling yourself these days."   
  
His dissemblance is genius. His face is so open, radiant. He is a martyr preparing to die for the sins of the unworthy. She is weightless, nothing, counterbalanced between belief and disbelief, her frayed and exhausted sanity nothing more than a theory.  
  
He's touching her mind again. Softly, lovingly, soothingly.   
  
"Tom is fine. Just Tom."  
  
Her throat constricts and her eyes burn but she ignores them. She pretends she hasn't heard him. "What's the price?"   
  
"Call me Tom," he urges, still charmingly, but she can see that the red still flickers behind his eyes and it is reassuring.  
  
"What is the price, Tom?" she says, not willing to give him the victory of her fight.  
  
He smiles and turns on his heel, his robes billowing out just so. He always knew how to make an impression. She tells herself she has seen it all before. Nothing new.   
  
He sits down behind the Headmaster's desk and there the truth behind the bone deep illusion of his youth crawls below the surface of his skin. He fits the desk, _fills_ it better than any boychild could, perhaps better than Dumbledore had.  
  
"You should not have argued with me, Minerva."   
  
"You're right. I should have killed you while you slept."  
  
"You couldn't have. Not then, anyway. You know," he sits back and lays his hand deliberately on the table, palm down, "I used to wonder how he finally managed to get you to kill for _him_. Don't look at me like that, Minerva. I know you did, back in the first war."  
  
She would swallow if her life hadn't been dried out and baked in his searing light. "He promised to get rid of you."   
  
His eyebrows rise and the corner of his mouth twitches in humour. "Yes," he says, "Well."  
  
He lifts his hand and makes a complicated gesture above the desk, his long, graceful fingers weaving power into the air, the serpent on her breast excited by even the slightest scent of his magic, and the door to the Headmaster's office opens.  
  
"Now it's my turn. Show me how things should have been."  
  
Early frost seeps into every one of her limbs and she wonders how long it will take him to break her. When, not if. She wonders if Gryffindors last longer.  
  
Then she realizes there is no one left who cares.  
  
Surely the bloody lump that Fenrir is dragging to her feet wouldn't care. It is a mess, poor thing, face smashed beyond human recognition, one eye put out completely. No doubt it is another of the soulless appropriated for the despicable animal to use and…  
  
Tom aims at Fenrir. "You are no longer needed here. Everything you touch becomes tainted," he says, " _Avada Kedavra._ " It is anticlimactic, the way the body slides to the floor, its mouthful of yellow teeth hanging open.   
  
She pays it no mind, too worried for the living, for the one in pain to revel in malicious joy. The one at her feet has a scar on its forehead, on the only place on its dried, bloodsoaked body that is carefully cleaned, dirt washed away from a circle of pale skin.   
  
"Harry," she says. It is a sacred moment because now she understands the end.   
  
There is warmth beside her and Tom is pressing her wand into her hand. That she is damned already doesn't make the shame any less when she feels a brief surge of relief at the feel of the wood in her palm.  
  
Harry – what was once Harry – lets out a moan and she can see that they've taken his tongue as well. He opens his eye, but it rolls in his head uselessly.  
  
She steels herself, weighing his pain against the whole of wizarding kind. She knows the Prophecy. And although she sets little store in Divination, Dumbledore had believed it, and she trusted Dumbledore, and so she believes. As long as Harry lives, there is still a chance they can win.   
  
One look at Tom confirms that he knows this now as well, the information doubtless torn from Harry before his tongue.   
  
She points her wand at Tom's broad chest. He is unafraid, which she expects, and he also looks deeply hurt, as though he is disappointed in her.  
  
Her hand wavers, not despite but because of everything. Because she can't curse him even though she should. Because the reason for her endless shame is suddenly quite, quite clear.   
  
She still loves him. She has never stopped loving him.   
  
"I was brutal because I had to be, Minerva. You couldn't take that journey with me. You wouldn't have stayed away."  
  
Her wand still points but the end is shaking, shaking, and her other hand covers her mouth in denial.   
  
"No," she says, knowing dimly that the snake on her body and the snake in her mind are trying to lie to her, make her believe there is one in her heart as well.  
  
"It will be beautiful," he promises, and she wants to believe him. "There is so much work to be done, Minerva, and I need you."  
  
Rainbows and endless Sunday afternoons, the gift of limitless delight when magic is free to make the stars dance in the night sky and children ride to school upon the backs of unicorns.   
  
"It's wrong," she whispers, "so much bloodshed. That is why I left you, Tom."  
  
"It's all over now. One sacrifice left, just one, and then only history books will speak of suffering."  
  
Her hand tightens on her wand. They both know that she cannot leave Harry in that condition.  
  
"Damn you."  
  
"I've brought you a gift." The blackness of his robes swirls outward in tendrils, fabric coming apart to reveal a pocket of nothing, from which he pulls silver.   
  
The sword of Godric Gryffindor.  
  
Subhuman gurgling screams greet the sight of the sword. Harry sees it and he remembers. He tries to stand, but broken legs give way with a moist grating sound. Recognition fades and the cries turn to shrieks of mindless agony.  
  
"It alone is a worthy vessel for your rest," Tom whispers above the din.  
  
She takes a deep breath and apologizes silently to herself, although she refuses to acknowledge why. She looks Tom in the eyes and he smiles encouragingly.  
  
Her wand moves to point at Harry. She is no longer trembling.  
  
She takes a breath.


End file.
